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Parliamentary elections set for Sept. 18

March 21, 2005|By Items compiled from Tribune news services.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — Afghanistan's much-delayed parliamentary elections will be held Sept. 18, more than a year after they originally were scheduled, the country's election commission announced Sunday.

The election will include voting for the upper and lower houses of parliament. But the voting by smaller districts, to select a third of the members of the upper house, will be postponed yet again, until 2006, said the election commission chairman, Bismillah Bismil.

Voters will elect 249 representatives from Afghanistan's 34 provinces to sit in the lower house; they also will pick one representative per province for the upper house.

Technical difficulties led the commission to postpone the parliamentary elections from the latest scheduled date in May 2005, Bismil said. Severe winter weather would prevent election workers from reaching many regions to register new voters in time, and the complexity of parliamentary and provincial elections presented enormous technical challenges, he said.